Families
Under Siege

Public Policy Aimed at Helping Could Be
Making
Things Worse, Scholars Conclude

by
Pat McBroom, Public Affairs

American families across the social and political spectrum are in trouble
and need help raising children.

The difficulties are not restricted to poor or single-parent families,
but also affect affluent, two-parent families, those often held up by conservative
commentators as models of family life.

Unfortunately, public policies that are supposed to help children and
their parents are actually making things worse, according to a new analysis
by 11 family scholars at UC, 10 of whom are from the Berkeley campus. This
collaboration includes academics from the fields of law, history, sociology,
social welfare, psychology and public policy.

In their new book, "All Our Families: New Policies for a New Century"
(Oxford University Press), the Berkeley Family Forum, a group of mostly
liberal academicians, joins conservatives in diagnosing trouble for the
family, but reaches vastly different conclusions about solutions.

The authors call for new ways to support children born into the diverse
families of the 1990s. More than half of the children born this year, for
instance, will lose one or both parents to divorce, abandonment or neglect
before they reach adulthood. Evidence shows that such children risk developing
emotional, social or academic problems.

But the researchers emphasize that marriage by itself is no solution
because middle class, two-parent families are in trouble too.

In provocative new findings on mainstream marriages, two members of the
forum reveal that up to a third of the couples they studied begin having
significant difficulties upon the birth of a child. Depression and marital
conflict are common.

"There is cause for concern about the health of 'the family'-even
those considered advantaged by virtue of their material and psychological
resources," said psychologists Philip and Carolyn Cowan.

"A surprisingly high proportion of couples experience increased
tension, conflict, distress and divorce in the early years after arrival
of a first child," they said.

Between a fourth and a third of some 200 families studied by the Cowans,
from pregnancy through a child's transition into elementary school, scored
high on depression and low on a marriage satisfaction scale, indicating
that their marriages could benefit from professional intervention.

Now in its 10th year, the Cowan study provided some of the 200 families
with psychological intervention and found not only that marriages improved,
but the children's performance in school did also, compared to families
receiving no outside help.

"Families are isolated," said Carolyn Cowan, a research psychologist
with the Institute of Human Development. "As a parent, you don't necessarily
know what you are doing, even if you've read a lot of books.

"There is no obvious place for parents to turn for help before their
stress begins to spill over into their marriages and their relationships
with their children," she said.

The Cowans are among some 40 academics at Berkeley who have been meeting
for the past three years in monthly seminars aimed at creating new policy
solutions for difficult family issues. Discussion has ranged widely, from
examining proposals for making divorce harder to new reproductive technologies,
the role of race in foster care and adoption, welfare reform, social security
solutions, domestic partnerships and European family policies.

Eleven of the participants have now brought their work together in "All
Our Families" edited by Professor of Social Welfare Mary Ann Mason,
psychological
researcher Arlene Skolnick, and Professor of Law Stephen D. Sugarman.

Chapters cover many hot-button issues, including teen-age parents, stepparents,
single parents, parents who kidnap, children of divorce, gay and lesbian
families, abusive families, dual career and nuclear families. Each chapter
has been written with a view toward creating public policies that will better
serve the welfare of children than current U.S. approaches.

One of its more controversial conclusions is a recommendation that laws
and rights governing parenthood shift from an emphasis on blood relationships
and give more rights to non-genetic parents, such as stepparents, while
making it easier for neglected children to be adopted.

"Our policies are rooted in blood and marriage. That seems wrong
in a day when biology bears less and less relationship with what children
need and current families are like," said Sugarman.

Mason, also a lawyer and professor, agreed that family law must shift
"from this great emphasis on biological parenthood, which is not always
best for children."

Mason argues for the creation of a category of de facto parent that would
give more rights and duties to stepparents who are actually raising children.

The book also discusses other solutions infrequently proposed in a public
forum-such as using the social security system to support children whose
fathers have abandoned them in the same way it now supports children whose
fathers have died.

"From the child's viewpoint, it doesn't matter whether the father
has died or disappeared," said Sugarman. "It isn't fair that we
help one child and not the other." In addition to the usual problems
that put a child at risk, such as having only one parent or being poor,
the book makes it plain that children from traditional two-parent families
are also being impaired psychologically and scholastically because of parental
stress.

Because of the Cowans' long-term follow-up of two-parent families, they
have been able to link actual declines in a child's early school performance
with the psychological and marital health of the parents-something that
has been hard to prove in past research.

Additional struggles in these families were caused by changing sex roles,
which made adversaries out of couples who needed and expected their partners
to be their main supports, said the Cowans.

The problem does not lie with working mothers, however. The researchers
discovered that children from families where mothers worked outside the
home for pay were slightly better off than children whose mothers worked
only at home. So, returning to traditional roles for women, as advocated
by conservative family commentators, is not likely to make things better
for families, the researchers said.

In fact, the Cowans found that the more traditional the family's sex
roles were in the division of labor, the more likely the parents were to
suffer from depression.

Calling modern couples "new pioneers," the psychologists believe
that the process of becoming a family is more difficult than it used to
be. They point out that instead of integral communities and kin groups of
the past, "most modern parents bring babies home to isolated dwellings
where their neighbors are strangers."

They recommend that health networks provide in-home care services and
consultation to new families.

"We need to hook these families up with some support services,"
said Philip Cowan, noting that in England, public health nurses provide
home visits and clinic access to each couple with a new baby, throughout
the child's first year.

"When you provide even minimal but thoughtful support, you see such
a difference," he said.

The authors said that new policies should also be made in the legal arena,
as in changing the laws governing parenthood, and by assuring that children
living in poverty receive greater financial support.